Tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips, the last installment of our summer series of songs about particular cities, celebrate’s Nevada’s desert city of non-stop twenty-four hour excitement, with its black jack, poker, roulette wheels, one-armed bandits and neon lights. From the 1964 movie of the same name, here’s early-Elvis impersonator Elvis Presley nonchalantly hamming his way through the conga-heavy hip-swiveller Viva Las Vegas.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Scopitones were jukebox-like machines, popular mostly in French bars and cafes for a few years in the early 1960s, that played specially-produced 16mm films of musical performers, typically pop stars. Attempts to expand the Scopitone market elsewhere met with little success, and soon the rather hefty machines, which were notoriously difficult to maintain and repair, disappeared into the hands of a few collectors.
Many of the clips, though, which were the early equivalent of MTV videos, are still around. Tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips is a Scopitone film featuring the musical stylings of a woman named Yvette Horner, a Serbian-born French accordionist who to date has sold over 30 million records. In the clip, her undeniable virtuosity combines with a lighter-than-air, inconsequential tune and oddly dream-like visuals to make for a interesting and peculiar little cultural artifact: here’s Yvette Horner performing En Glissant.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

The Violent Femmes were a rather unorthodox, stripped-down three piece folk-punk band from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who, during their heyday in the 80s and early 90s hovered between underground cult status and mainstream success. The thematically offbeat nature of their songs is at least partially attributable to the fact that Gordon Gano, the band’s songwriter and lead singer, was (he still is) a devout Christian; while nobody could consider the Femme’s music to be religious per se (the other two band members made clear to Gano that they weren’t amicable to that) Gano’s lyrics often expressed, if obliquely, a rooted unease with mass-culture morality.
In tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips, Gano sings with a disarmingly cheerful tension about the undeniable, there-it-is fallout – the widespread joy and damage – of a society weaned on American pop culture. From a live appearance on the old Dennis Miller TV show, here are the Violent Femmes performing a song from their 1991 album Why Do Birds Sing? called American Music.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.